It's About Time

Well well well, hello! 

I'm not sure I'll keep this up, but my blog has been such a good record and resource for of my life and art, that I'm going to try and get this going again. Instagram has taken over as an easy and quick way of posting work, but I think I'll try and synch the two - probably just repeat most things, but perhaps embellishing further on here occasionally. If I can remember how to do this!

Right now, I'm about to show some of my work in an exhibition, called It's About Time - an appropriate title in many more ways than one - with a group of friends who have been meeting for the last eight years or so. Gathering in each other's homes and online, discussing, showing, encouraging and accompanying each other through the joys, doubts, frustrations and triumphs of art-making, in all our different ways - through the isolation of Covid and beyond.

This is an invitation then, if there's anyone still out there... and a revival of A Sketch in Time! 🙌

 

Printing and sketching at WAM

I'm sorry my posting is so erratic - I have been painting, but nothing I feel quite OK with showing anyone. Oil painting feels a bit like wading through mud right now... hoping it will change into a flowing stream soon, I'll keep trying.

It was a busy sketching weekend though, with a friend's wedding on Friday. I may post those sketches later as they need a bit of work. I've sketched at a few now, and it's hard to convey all the colour, ceremony, movement and emotional importance of weddings on the spot. I always hope for much better results than I get and I would like to give them something worth keeping!

On Saturday our group went to the Wits Art Museum where a Walter Battiss exhibition is on, and a children's printmaking workshop. I had already had a good look at the exhibition a couple of weeks ago, so I concentrated on the oblivious back views of the people looking at the art. We went to the coffee shop to find the children's workshop in full swing. There were a lot more kids and adults than I could fit into my sketch but it was great to see a museum space being used to stimulate children into actually making art themselves instead of being passive (and often bored) onlookers. The tall photographer did double duty as one of the few who could reach the drying lines.

Scenes from an Exhibition

Not proud of myself that I completely baled out of my commitment to draw Every Day in May last month, but you'll be pleased to know (I hope) that it succeeded in making me realise what it was I really wanted to be doing. So I've spent the last couple of weeks with canvases, brushes and paint, and though I don't really want to talk about it yet, I am happy that the ball is kind of bumpily rolling in that direction - I'll show you when there's something finished and worth showing. 

In the meantime, the sketchers were invited to the Rotary Art Festival at the upmarket shopping centre of Hyde Park over three of the ten days that it was on for. Loads of artists exhibiting over three floors, life drawing, painting and printmaking demos, restaurants and viewing public, there was plenty to sketch. I think next time, if there is one, we should have an Urban Sketching display with explanations of what we try to do, as we attracted some quizzical and suspicious looks.

This was a group of exhibiting artists having what looked like a very entertaining lunch

 And some unsuspecting patrons at the same restaurant

where some very busy waiters were the next victims

We sat up on the top floor looking down at more restaurants and some of the people milling around the exhibition. Then an attempt to catch in colour people as they stood on the escalator coming up. Those things go much faster than you think, and everyone looks up startled to see eyes fixed upon them, so it was short-lived!

Exhibition of student's work

Hi - sorry about another long absence - I've been paddling as fast and as diligently as I can to help make this exhibition happen this weekend. Somehow or other I got to be coordinator-in-chief in spite of the almost catatonic state I get into when in administrative pressure roles.
Amazingly enough, I think we're on track and all will appear as planned on Saturday. It is, as you can see, an exhibition of student's work done in, or as a result of Greg Kerr's painting courses and has lots of interesting, unusual and provocative pieces. The image on the invitation is by Tracy Witelson, artist and art teacher, and assistant to Greg when he is teaching in Johannesburg, from The Dinner Party programme that I participated in 2013. I'll have two or three paintings on from this year's Objets Trouvès course (which I still have to show the end results of here, sometime).

If anyone who sees this is in Joburg this weekend, please come along, I'd love to meet you!

Joburg City Centre

Our small sketching group was invited to go and sketch in the city by a group of artists who are holding an exhibition called Joburg Joburg, which aims to engage its immediate surroundings and to promote the renewal of the city centre.

We have ventured to the edges of the city in Newtown a few times, but never really braved the inner streets until now. I started on one of Joburg's oldest buildings, Victory House, while we waited for everyone to arrive (finding architecture as difficult as ever!) - quite a crowd of nine when joined by some of the participating artists. We then walked along to Ghandi Square, which was fairly quiet on a Saturday morning, but a few shoppers and people waiting for buses.

We then tried to go to our next destination outside the City Hall, but found the roads closed and access denied as they were shooting "dangerous scenes" for the new Avengers movie! We did hear a huge crash while we were sketching nearby in the Library Gardens, where political and church meetings, ladies selling religious tracts and boys on skateboards were all on the go.

For the first time, the progression of a sketch of mine of a food vendor's stall was being videoed by a young photographer from Pretoria, when the owner of the stall came over, irate that we were focusing on his enterprise (we had asked someone who we thought was the owner) ...another first for me... so we had to reluctantly give up on that, after spending so long setting up angles and supports.

I sketched the skateboarders instead, who didn't mind at all! More sketches and photos of the day here....

Ackland Museum Show in North Carolina!

 The first group show of Urban Sketchers: Seeing the World, One Drawing at a Time opens at the Ackland Museum of Art, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Thursday August 16th. Thirty eight of the group's one hundred contributors have donated sketches, proceeds from the sales of which will go mainly to Urban Sketchers to support their educational programmes, with a small percentage to the Ackland Art Museum. These are two of the four sketches I sent in, with my thanks to Gabi Campanario and Urban Sketchers, for the wide world they've opened up to me! 

This is a street scene in Parkview (other sketches from there here). Along the pavement, vendors set up their wares and hope people visiting the shops and restaurants will stop and buy. The man was selling bulbs from his carrier bag, with a magazine opened on a page with pictures of clivia in bloom. I have bought bulbs from a similar salesman before, and something completely different came up from what he showed me, so you take your chances!

The woman selling baskets and pots sat patiently, aware that I was sketching her. When the sun started sinking she loaded up her goods to leave - she saw me pick up my pen to sketch her again, and said in words I couldn't really understand, but got the gist of, that she certainly wasn't going to hang around to be drawn again - and within minutes was flouncing off down the road, and gone.

Orchid show and a sale!

This past weekend was the Orchid Show at the botanical gardens which are conveniently close by to where we live. Yesterday I took my small watercolour moleskine and tiny tin of paints and tried to sketch surreptitiously around the displays. I couldn't get over the huge variety of species of orchid, including some tiny delicate indigenous beauties and one huge magenta coloured one that smelled like a heavenly confection of vanilla, cinnamon and other spices. I wish I'd gone to look on one day and sketch on another, as I didn't get around the whole show after dawdling over my doodles - but glad I braved the curiosity of passers by, who were only pleasant and respectful of my attempts!
And... some long-timers who've read my blog for a couple of years may (or may not!) remember these posts from August 2008 where I painted three very big watercolours on request for possible sale to a client of an art promoter friend, for his offices. After much paint, paper, and long urgent hours of slog... he rejected them and they disappeared off my radar screen until a couple of weeks ago when Jane asked if she could put them on an exhibition at the new iStore, how cool is that! And they all sold! After I'd totally given up on them. in fact I was planning to use them for collages or recycling of some sort when I got them back. There they are hanging against the stairwell - they weren't even framed, which would have been a very expensive undertaking, but Jane's clever placing of them suspended in space was very effective. Below that some sculptures by Johannes and Collen Maswaganyi with part of the Sandton skyline behind them.

A sculpture exhibition

I can't believe it's over a week since I posted - the year is galloping away and leaving me a bit dazed in its wake. Yesterday I somehow got dressed in clothes that were too smart to paint in (I'm working on an oil painting, but not at all sure that I'm ready to show it to anybody) so decided to go and look at the Dylan Lewis sculpture exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery and do a bit of necessary shopping. The sculptures are gigantic and roughly hewn - he leaves many of the marks of building, finger and hand prints, interspersed with carefully crafted details - they look as if they've been dragged, or dragged themselves, up from the earth. I sketched one of the massive figures, hoping someone would come along to show the scale in my drawing, but no one did - you can more or less tell by the size of the doorway. I photographed the explanatory piece on the right - I think its written by Laura Twiggs - that was up on the wall, as well as writing down a quotation that was displayed as part of the exhibit, on the sketchbook page.

I've just started reading Art of Sketching (Sterling Publishing) and trying to be more expressive with my marks - so far its a really helpful and informative, richly illustrated guide that promises to reveal many of the aspects of sketching that have eluded me up to now.

My seagull as a Miro

...with apologies to Miro! I took my Seagull painting and a couple of other watercolours - spring sketches done in my garden - to the Watercolour Society yesterday to submit for a "New Signatures' exhibition. I've put off getting more involved in the WSSA for so long, and though I wasn't too confident about my paintings, I thought I'd Just Do It instead of procrastinating for another month/year/decade. I overheard two members there puzzling over the painting..."What is it?"... "a banana?"..."I don't know..." And when my son asked which paintings I'd taken, I told him and he said, "Oh, ja, the Seagull and the Banana"! :oD Then my sister Gillian asked in the comments what is a bollard, she's never heard of it, I thought I'd better explain a few things!
At Kalk Bay harbour I was talking to my husband about 'those yellow things', and he informed me they were called Bollards, which according to the dictionary is a 'short thick post to which a ship's mooring-rope may be tied' (my husband knows everything!)
I was seeing the shapes as a sort of abstract design - crescent moon (I didn't see a banana!), heart and bird-shadow, and in a realistic painting I probably should have described the bollard better - painted round the ellipse at the base instead of blending it into its shadow, or else done it whole-heartedly as an abstract - even my 'Miro' version could get a lot more abstract.
I'm kind of expecting to have to collect my Seagull from the WSSA after selection day, probably with a kind but baffled comment about the Yellow Thing hovering above the gull...

Cheerio, chooks

Well the Fair is finally over - a sigh of relief and a slight feeling of emptiness as the pressure of the last weeks is lifted. My Chicken series sold, and two of the Pavement women scenes, and one Jacaranda, with possibly two more after a night or two of sleeping on the thought, so I had a good day. Very little else was sold, sadly, as there was some excellent art on show, at I think reasonable prices. As I've said before, I think a church arts fair won't generally attract big art buyers - unless word gets around and next time (if there is one), they'll come flocking in. I think the familiarity of these scenes, plus their small size and relative prices, worked quite well at this particular show. My favourite bit about it all was

meeting and chatting to some of the other artists - somehow

or other I haven't had that opportunity at other exhibitions - I suppose because I've never 'baby-sat' my work before all through the showing. Some interesting information and contacts were swopped and I'm quite excited to be not quite as on my own in this part of the world as I have been for a long time - many of my past partners-in-art have left Johannesburg for greener pastures over the years - it's high time I found some new ones!

Marlene and me

I was just doodling, really, with watercolour and brown ink today - using a picture of Gwen Stefani from a magazine to try out a watercolour portrait, when serendipitously (long word!) an interview started on Radio 702 with Jenny Crwys-Williams talking to Marlene Dumas, whose first SA exhibition starts at the Standard Bank Gallery tonight, having ended it's run in Cape Town. (She is well-known for her watercolour portraits, many of which are taken from magazine images, and sometimes of 'celebrities'. We're obviously totally in synch, us two famous artists!)
I am very proud to boast that I was at Michaelis School of Fine Art at the very same time as Marlene, and remember her well as a beautiful, lively and friendly person around the campus. She, of course, was a Fine Art student, already causing a bit of a stir - I remember her having her photo taken with all the lecturers in the quad, probably when she was chosen to take up her scholarship in Amsterdam - while I was a lowly and not very dedicated Graphic Design student. How I wish I could have those years back and take full advantage of the opportunities I didn't realise I had at that time...maybe I would also be selling paintings for millions of dollars by now... well I can dream, can't I?